


keep me surfaced

by truthwallflower



Series: keep me [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Claude overthinks, F/M, as usual, bit of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 03:34:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21487675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/truthwallflower/pseuds/truthwallflower
Summary: Perhaps Byleth slept so long because no one was there to wake her. The idea haunts Claude.
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth & Claude von Riegan, My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Series: keep me [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1546423
Comments: 4
Kudos: 170





	keep me surfaced

When Byleth ascends the steps of the Goddess Tower, every sense of Claude’s goes numb. There is a white noise piercing his ears and he cannot help the beam that encapsulates his every pore. His body feels sluggish and he is certain that heavy weighted slowness creeping in his brain is the only thing stopping his hands from shaking. He can barely hear himself when he quips comments at her as if it has been days instead of years.

There is something about Byleth in that moment, staring up at him as if he is an apparition, as if this is a dream, that makes him want to wrap her up in his blankets and keep her locked in his rooms with hot tea and pastries. She doesn't seem to realise she is sopping wet, or how vulnerable her eyes look staring up into his.

He does not know what has happened to her, but there is time for that later. They will parse through why she hasn’t been there, and why he no longer has a braid. They have time now to eat and drink and bathe. For him to talk her ear off about every inconsequential detail he has been storing up to tell her over the last five years.

When he goes back to his rooms from the academy that night, bandits routed and everyone here, everyone safe, that is when he notices his hands have begun to shake. Claude takes a deep breath, ignoring the tremors working their way up his throat, and sits heavily on his bed. He thinks of how warm Byleth’s skin felt through the thick of his gloves.

If Claude weeps, then, finally bereft of that cursed ringing dulling his senses, no one but the dusty walls of his room are there to notice.

***

It is later, when it finally sinks in that Byleth has been comatose (His smile is full of teeth when he says ‘sleeping’) for five fucking years and no one noticed.

In his heart of hearts Claude knew something had gone horribly wrong, enough she had not been able to find him in all that time, but this was something he had never imagined. He had thought the most likely option was that she had forgotten about them (him). It wouldn’t have been her fault. She was just wont to forget.

So when he realises that Byleth woke up on the banks of a river, drenched and somehow not drowned, he seethes. Hilda and Lorenz balk at his snippy behaviour, the brunt of his bad attitude merely because he knows they can take it. Claude doesn't feel bad about it, not at first, because Byleth was all alone, who knows what could have happened to her while she was unconscious for five whole years? And surely that was someones fault, he was sure the two realised that, so maybe if they got their heads out of their asses and stopped being so smitten with each other, they could have done something about it.

That line of thinking stops quickly when Claude comes across the sight of Lorenz with his head in his hands, quietly crying, with Hilda rubbing his shoulders. It seemed Claude wasn’t the only one who blamed him for the professor’s years of hiatus. It seemed he wasn’t the only one who mourned those precious years without Byleth quietly guiding them.

Claude goes out of his way to support the Golden Deer after that. Mostly because it was that, the sight of Lorenz breaking down, that made him realise the truth.

It was Claude’s fault that Byleth had not been found for all those years.

***

Claude doesn’t tell Byleth of his revelation. He doesn’t tell her of the wild thoughts spinning through his brain of what could’ve been done to her while she was so vulnerable. Of the almost and could have beens. His dreams became ridden with nightmares of all the possibilities, more and more horrifying. He sees her body being swallowed up by flood, crushed by mudslides, eaten by scavenging animals.

He sees bandits taking advantage of a pretty young thing wrapped in tights and corsets, unconscious and ripe for the taking.

It is this image in particular that causes Claude to wake up, jerking, in cold sweats. He sees the ghost, the after image, of his demons the next morning when she smiles at him, ever unsuspecting to the horrors rattling around his mind. It makes him fear to touch her, as if the taint of his whirring brain will slide oily into her pores.

It doesn’t, of course. It just makes his breath hitch and his heart skip shallowly. 

Claude thinks often of how it was Sothis, still with her and looking over Byleth much more than he ever could, that saved her. Woke her up. The annoying buzz, as Byleth told him fondly, of a young girl nagging at her. 

Claude remembers, when she told him, cracking a joke about how if she thought Sothis was annoying, imagine if it were he that had found her. She’d be wanting to go back to sleep on principle.

They both pretended they couldn’t see the strain in the corner of his eyes when he said that. Claude wonders how much Byleth can tell he really meant it. He wonders how much of his torment she can see just by giving him one good stare.

The idea of telling Byleth that it was his fault sends a fear that sends his pulse racing and his eyes skittering straight through his bones. He claws at his hair just at the thought. Claude is selfish enough that he does not want to see the derision in her eyes that would bloom if he ever told her he could have saved her. If only he had found her, had looked harder.

Instead, she saved herself.

***

Leonie starts giving Claude hard looks whenever they make eye contact, even when there is no context. They could be sitting around the cardinals table discussing the best type of food to eat before battle (Raphael’s choice of conversation, naturally) when she catches his eye.

“Fish, of course.” She said casually. But she looked right at Claude as she did, not glaring, not exactly, but fixing him with a look he can’t help but eschew as incriminating. 

She does this for awhile, to the point he gathers she must be blaming him too, must agree that he did not do enough to save Jeralt’s daughter. Did not use her resourcefulness in the best way, did not utilise her fervour at being the one to find the professor, at leading every discreet search party he could possibly arrange.

“You’re being a fool,” she tells him one day.

Claude merely nods, hands locked behind his head with a genial smile. 

***

Claude wonders if the reason Byleth was gone for so long, why the goddess she’d merged with had harrumphed and said enough is enough, is because she was supposed to be found.

Perhaps Sothis had thought Byleth mattered enough to her students that one of them would find her, tucked away in a coma perhaps meant to be much shorter. Perhaps the divine being thought to herself that Byleth’s precious little deer would be there for her, smiles akimbo as they woke her.

Claude knows this isn’t fair. That the Golden Deer did everything they could. That everything they could was orchestrated by him, anything beyond that too far from Claude’s mind and inaccessible to him.

He believes the goddess must think him stupid, for not finding Byleth. For abandoning her to the depths of some unknown hole in the ground. 

He wonders if the reason Byleth slept so long was merely because he was not there to wake her up.


End file.
